Show HN: Claude's innerworkings: turn 170 costs 2.1x turn 20, over 14,640 turns

A Hacker News user analyzing 144 Claude sessions with 14,640 turns found that after turn 141, each turn costs 2.1 times what a turn costs in the first 20 turns of the same session, prompting them to stop batching sessions. The analysis, conducted in a CoWork session with Claude, also revealed that standing context re-reads every turn (114,133 tokens on the hub seat, 108,213 on a spoke) and that humans account for 67% of the wall clock time. The user's project, my-status.app, tracks tasks and aims to split work between human and Claude based on strengths.

On Aug 26, this happened in my CoWork session: Tom: I can't help but think we can do some other cool stuff with this knowledge of Claude's innerworkings regarding sessions, etc. Any thing sticks out to you that I haven't captured/asked for yet? Claude: Six: the scaffolding trend the cost of our own rules, creeping 87,999 → 92,619 → 93,809 across three seats , the review share of the wall clock the thesis measured , the session aging curve when a fresh seat is cheaper , before/after receipts on process changes, model economics, and a crash watchdog reading both records. Four days later, we analyzed 144 sessions, 14,640 turns. The facts showed us that past turn 141, a turn costs 2.1x what a turn cost in the same session's first twenty. https://my-status.app/stats aging https://my-status.app/stats aging The worst offenders were our own batch sessions, so we stopped batching. What we do is our own flavor of "one thinking session, short task sessions" to better utilize my plan. I kept running out of Fable usage and had about half my usage leftover for Opus. But this only happened because we wrote a script to surface the data to us. Granted, our first run found a bug in our script: 46.6M tokens that were really 28.1M. https://my-status.app/t/t33hPWp7zmtnAE5G/u/d2ba812d-13bb-4ad... https://my-status.app/t/t33hPWp7zmtnAE5G/u/d2ba812d-13bb-4ade-8480-aabc7d9be6ed This peek into the innerworkings of Claude fascinated me, so we kept counting: the standing context re-read every turn 114,133 tokens on the hub seat https://my-status.app/t/6iYmualpgrZ6 C9u/u/2f4d4498-dcdb-43a... https://my-status.app/t/6iYmualpgrZ6 C9u/u/2f4d4498-dcdb-43a5-84f9-7e3eb68416f1 , 108,213 on a spoke https://my-status.app/t/Zsse45gEDBTQ6mOL/u/c3f8bca2-b7f9-4be... https://my-status.app/t/Zsse45gEDBTQ6mOL/u/c3f8bca2-b7f9-4bee-b313-442552fb9753 and the human's share of the clock 67% https://my-status.app/stats review https://my-status.app/stats review . The best part of all this to me: every feature moving forward comes with receipts. Take the aging curve: it cost 2.6 person hours and $8.23 in tokens at list rates. https://my-status.app/receipts https://my-status.app/receipts We have a whole bunch of stats for you to nerd out on if you want. It's a bit overboard, but new things pop up as other things come down. https://my-status.app/stats https://my-status.app/stats I know we're not the only ones geeking out about stuff like this. What else have you all measured, and what surprised you in the findings? Oh and if you wanna know what the heck the project was originally built for: it's public task tracking, for things like a 20 mile run https://my-status.app/t/EdiPcBGBZxcGkr9x https://my-status.app/t/EdiPcBGBZxcGkr9x or which app versions are supported https://my-status.app/t/i3jQU03T46e0hrsk https://my-status.app/t/i3jQU03T46e0hrsk . The experiment behind the project is: Can a human and Claude build something new, splitting the work along what each excels in? Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49552931 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49552931 Points: 1 Comments: 0